Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/914

Rh In 1867, I introduced a bill in the State Senate, looking to the enfranchisement of all women in West Virginia, who can read the Declaration of Independence intelligently, and write a legible hand, and have actually paid tax the year previous to their proposing to vote. But even this guarded bill had no friends but myself. I introduced a resolution during the present session of our legislature, asking congress to extend the right of suffrage to women. Eight out of the twenty-two members of the Senate voted for it. This is quite encouraging—advancing from one to eight in two years. At this rate of progress, we may succeed by next winter. I give the names of those who are in favor of and voted for female suffrage in the Senate: Drummond, Doolittle, Humphreys, Hoke, Wilson, Workman, Young, and Farnsworth, president. The same senators voted to invite Miss Anna E. Dickinson to lecture in the state-house during her late visit to Wheeling.

We are indebted to Mrs. Mary Bayard Clarke of New Berne for the following:

Since 1868, when the constitution was changed, a married woman has absolute control of al] the real estate she possessed before marriage or acquired by gift or devise after it, except the power to sell without the consent of her husband, who in his turn is not at liberty to sell any real estate possessed by him before marriage, or acquired after it, without the consent of his wife. Should he sell any real estate without the wife's consent, in writing, she can, after his death, claim her dower of one-third in such real estate. If she owns a farm and her husband manages it, she can claim full settlements from him, he having no more rights than any other agent whom she may employ. So her property, real and personal, is her individual right, with the income therefrom. But she cannot contract a debt that is binding on her property without the consent of her husband. With his written consent, which must be registered in the office of the clerk of the county in which she resides, she may become a free-trader with all the rights of a man, her husband having no claim to her gains and not being responsible for any debt which she may contract. By giving this written consent her husband virtually places her in the position of an unmarried woman, as far as her property is concerned.

In 1881, finding that a widow had no right to appoint a guardian for her children by "letters testamentary," I, through my son, William E. Clarke, who was then senator for this county in our State legislature, succeeded in getting this law so changed that she now has the same rights as a man. In cases of divorce or separation while the children are under age, it is discretionary with the judge to give the children to either parent; but public sentiment always gives them to the mother while young.

As a rule the women of the South are better educated than the men, the boys being put to work while the girls are at school. The girls are not trained to work in any way, and very few, as yet, see the necessity of being regularly trained to do anything by which they may make a living except as teachers. Our public-school system requires a course through the normal] school for all teachers. Mixed schools are not popular with us, but we have been forced into them by the public-graded-school tax, which has crushed out our private schools, I am now, and have been for the past two years, making an effort to have women on our school-boards, and a female as well as a male principal for every mixed public school, on the ground that mothers have as much right to a voice in the education of their daughters as fathers have in that of their sons. We have female teachers in our public schools but not as principals, and the pay of the women is, regardless of the quality of their work, always considerably less than that of men.

Our Supreme Court granted a license to Miss Tabitha A. Holton to practice law, and there is no legal impediment in the way of one doing so. The same is true of the medical profession. Dr. Susan Dimock was a North Carolinian by birth and on her